Figure Group of the Festival at the Chateau (La fête au château) or the Model Fidelity (La fidélité modèle) (1766): Art, History and Details

Figure Group of the Festival at the Chateau (La fête au château) or the Model Fidelity (La fidélité modèle) (1766) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Sèvres Porcelain Factory (French, est. 1756); Etienne-Maurice Falconet (French, 1716–1791); François Boucher (French, 1703–1770).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Recognizable porcelain figures and figure groups modeled after contemporary theatrical works produced by the Parisian company Opéra-Comique were produced at the Vincennes factory as early as 1752. This group illustrates a scene from a play credited to Charles-Siméon Favart, Fête au Château (Festival at the Castle), when the gardener Jacquot and his love Colette reunite.

Object facts

• Title: Figure Group of the Festival at the Chateau (La fête au château) or the Model Fidelity (La fidélité modèle)
• Date: 1766
• Creator attribution: Sèvres Porcelain Factory (French, est. 1756); Etienne-Maurice Falconet (French, 1716–1791); François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France, Sèvres
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: unglazed soft-paste porcelain (biscuit)
• Dimensions: Overall: 21 x 16.5 x 15.9 cm (8 1/4 x 6 1/2 x 6 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1966.234

A detail from the museum

The introduction of Sèvres porcelain figures modeled after the Opéra-Comique’s theatrical productions may have resulted from the friendship between François Boucher, designer of many early Sèvres porcelain figures, and Charles-Siméon Favart, director of the theater in 1758.

Collection credit

The Norweb Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Bourgeois, Émile. Le biscuit de Sèvres au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Goupil, 1909.
• Les Biscuits de la manufacture nationale de Sevres, XVIIIe siecle & XIXe siecle. Paris: A. Guerinet, 1910.
• Bourgeois, Émile, and Georges Lechevallier-Chevignard. Le biscuit de Sèvres: recueil des modèles de la manufacture de Sèvres au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: P. Lafitte, 1914.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.